


A Synchronous Shadow

by ObliObla



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Creation Myth, Gen, Hallucinogens, Light Angst, Mythology References, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 03:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18562984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Lucifer turns off his phone, locks the elevator, pours a glass of water and prepares himself for a night of respite from the façade of humanity, of reprieve from his mortal shell.





	A Synchronous Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much [matchstick_dolly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchstick_dolly/pseuds/matchstick_dolly), [HiroMyStory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiroMyStory/pseuds/HiroMyStory), and [emynii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii) for their invaluable beta work!
> 
> For LuciferBingo prompt: angel

Lucifer turns off his phone, locks the elevator, pours a glass of water and prepares himself for a night of respite from the façade of humanity, of reprieve from his mortal shell.

He lays out his implements of pleasure as he would his instruments of torture, with precision, fingers trailing against his bed—the glass pipe, the ceramic filters, the lighter, the sweet tobacco for gentle stimulation, the Kush to soften the hallucinatory effect and, of course, the proprietary blend he receives from his best chemist, strong enough to overcome his celestial metabolism without all the harshness of the raw material.

He settles on the mattress cross legged and performs the ritual, mixing the substances carefully, bringing the flame forth to vaporize the drug and holding it in his lungs for a long moment before exhaling languidly. Over and over again until his limbs feel too heavy to lift and he sets the pipe and the lighter down, falling back against golden sheets. He sees, gleaming among the high windows, the darkness that waits for him to unbind himself from his self-imposed shackles and give in to its revelation. And so, he splays out his limbs, blinks idly, and loses himself.

What is the nature of shadow without light to cast it?

Where are its bounds? What are its lineaments? When did it begin and how, precisely, will it die?

But the questions in his mind fade in silence like the sun against celestial spheres. This shade drawn from lesser shades is boundless, without aspect or origin or death.

A shining, beauteous mask that, once pulled away, reveals one crude and grotesque, and another, delible and flattened, another and still another in infinite masquerade. None lies. None the truth.

For what can absence be without substance? What is being without nothingness? What is music absent rest?

What is oblivion without the sweet sting of memory?

To be defined only by one’s opposite is to see into the mind of a god of absolutes whose liminal edges are marked out without subtlety or grace. But absolution forges only hollowness from fractured matter.

Can the eye see itself?

Sightlessness carries with it sleep, and cold narcotics bring forth dreams. The sky and the sea burn blue with the same light. Darkness blazes in want of color, not black but devoid of spirit.

And there, mixing aether and starlight, suspended in space on the twin wings of creation, lies the void. Making and unmaking in simultaneity, that stately abyss looks into itself and finds only the tenebrous placidity of vacant heavens and ponderous, teeming hells.

A spark in the dullness. A raucous whisper, sounding and resounding with hope and desolation.

He shifts beneath the silk and turns his face upward to meet the radiance of the moon. A lifeless rock shimmering with stolen light, playing at being its source but only, ultimately, reflecting the fire of its betters, and he shuts his eyes against its mocking glare.

The face of god is perfect in its violent imperfection.

Somewhere between the stars hidden by weaker light and the ashes of nebulae unshaped rests the alien tears of a sorrow shattered by a crueler joy, and he turns away from such brilliant pain and shuts his eyes against their burning, burying his head in badly-earned tenderness and baring the destruction and renewal of an unblemished back to the tumultuous serenity.

There is kindness in the darkness for a being formed from light. A promise of ceaseless strife and comfortingly constant terror. A vow of freedom untempered by complacency, but even the ever industrious Devil sometimes desires a moment of peace.

Sloth may indeed be the frailer of his sins, but he shall gladly partake. Shall glut on contemplation and gorge himself with quietude until his cup runneth over with the sweetness of stillness and the acridity of the self-deception on his tongue.

And he is alone.

Alone and yet surrounded, overburdened by such simmering heat he presses his closed eyes harder into the pillow, watching embers flare with confusion and blood where the pressure is greatest.

They speak their poison in his ears, these bastard children of a more untimely deity that set the celestial spheres aflame and led them through the careful steps of this inexorable dance.

His hand trails down until it catches at the edge of his thigh, skin like clay yet unfired, and he forms and unforms himself. Mixes his ichor with primordial mud and breathes life into his own nostrils, his soul bent low over the face of the waters.

Perhaps he _is_ a god. Perhaps he is undying because he cannot let himself into his own embrace. Perhaps the blood that falls as rain from his flesh is the sap of the tree that surmounts the world. And perhaps he will hang on its branches, side slashed, or else be chained to a rock in the sea of thought and motion while his fear and his love and his rapture are torn away by disinterested talons.

Or maybe he will be the charioteer whose wheel is the disc of the sun, or he who guided the great archer through the cycle of dharma. He will play the song of madness on his pipes of bone and glass to founder the lost and lead them adrift or else drink and drink yet deeper of wine unmixed with water until he sees himself die and live again in the mirrored surface of Narcissus’ pool.

And he will meet a man at a crossroads and grant him a favor, or an audience with an even more recalcitrant creature than he, and burn in the early dawn as the star of the morning, heralding moans and battle lust and the all-devouring fog of war. He will be a raven picking at berries and offal or a spider weaving a dream within a nightmare or else a young man with a tinkling laugh and an outstretched hand saying, _Come play with me in Neverland_.

And there, at the end, he will be himself, solely, and there will be a _he_ for him to be, defined not by what he isn’t but what he _is_ and his will be a life devoid of empty shades and colder reflections.

As the edges of his consciousness flood inward and the gates of ivory close in favor of the horn, he finds himself supine again, watching the faint traces of stars through hazy obscurity.

Their shouts have faded back to whispers and he rejoices in the tranquility even as he mourns the loss of the dread honey of their voices raised in heavenly chorus. For he was the angel of light and bliss and song, but he is nothingness now, and otherness, and shadow. The path that crooks to show the way that is straighter.

And he will smoke a warming pipe and he will eat ambrosia. And he will drink nectar and soma from a jeweled goblet to lose himself again to the blindness and the punishment and the never all-consuming bitter blankness of the poison and the venom and the drug.


End file.
